Here's Liz with a truly outstanding post on social tagging. I discovered the ESP game
too not long ago, and had been thinking of blogging about it, but she
does such a fine job that I'll be content to highlight the tension that
exists between expertness and specialization on the one hand, and
retrievability of information by non-experts on the other hand. I think
we may need levels of description for things; accessing them would be a
matter of selecting a club or social circle. It would be *fascinating*
to compare how different groups classify the same objects.
And the ESP game, which is based on the wonderful idea of stealing idle
cycles from human brains to build useful metadata, gave me an idea that
would work somewhat in reverse: capturing (with players' permission)
drawings from the isketch game
to build a public domain, clipart-style database of sketches of things.
The accuracy of a drawing could be inferred from how many points the
drawer managed to rack up.
Reading Sunir Shah's post on the proposed "nofollow" measure,
which will prevent links in comment sections on some blogging platforms
from contributing to search engine data, has reinforced my conviction
that this will not be effective in bringing down comment spam. One of
Sunir's arguments is that it is assuming too much cluefulness on the
part of spammers: "Even if savvy spammers stop, naive spammers will
still keep coming."
And Jay Fienberg doesn't want to deny his (legitimate) commenters the ability to feed the search engines:
So, because I believe in the link—the link is what made the web, made
blogs, made RSS, made search engines, etc., I have no plans to use
rel="nofollow" on my blogs.
Pity the commenters - the 1% of them who are spammers are making the
other 99% look bad, and their rights are being clamped down on :(
